American Rebels
Page 10
Governor Bernard directed that Ebenezer Mackintosh, alleged leader of the attack on Hutchinson’s home, be arrested and that other rioters be taken into custody as well. But Sam Adams, supported by a group of Boston merchants, forced Bernard to release Mackintosh; Adams’ group threatened to take apart the customhouse where the man was being held, “stone by stone” if he was not set free. The others were sprung from jail late at night, with little obstruction from the jailer.8
Protests against the Stamp Act continued as the Loyall Nine, now broadened in membership and calling themselves Sons of Liberty, scheduled public events throughout the fall. Men designated to sell the stamps would be called out, one by one, and ordered to renounce their commissions. If they failed to do so, they would be subjected to the wrath of the mob. The Liberty Tree on Orange Street—where the effigy of Andrew Oliver had swung—was chosen as the site for the public humiliations. Stand by the tree—in the “Liberty Hall,” as it was called—and renounce the title of stamp seller, the Sons of Liberty commanded, or be hanged by the condemnation of the mob.9
This Liberty Tree was just across the road from the rum distillery owned by Thomas Chase, one of the original Loyall Nine. Many meetings were held at the distillery, where, spurred on by both rum and speeches, incendiary acts were planned to protest parliamentary actions. The name of the tree became official when colonists nailed a copper plate engraved with the words TREE OF LIBERTY to its trunk and poems were written in honor of this “stately elm … whose lofty branches seem’d to touch the skies.”10
Around the colony, and throughout America, other trees were claimed as liberty trees. In Harvard Yard, students of the college chose a stately elm for their “liberty tree” or “rebellion elm,”11 and in New York City, perhaps with fewer trees to choose from, colonists erected a “liberty pole” on Golden Hill in 1766.12 British soldiers were so angered by the symbolism of the pole that they chopped it down, but within months another pole was erected, which was once again cut down, and so the third pole erected was reenforced with iron bands.
* * *
John Adams joined in the protests against the Stamp Act by writing a series of anonymous letters that were printed in the Boston Gazette and together were titled “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.” Instead of attacking the act directly in his essay, John wrote about the history of the colony and the motivation of its earliest settlers: “It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed [that settled America]; but it was a love of universal liberty.… Tyranny in every form, shape, and appearance was their disdain and abhorrence; no fear of punishment, nor even of death itself in exquisite tortures, had been sufficient to conquer that steady, manly, pertinacious spirit with which they had opposed … tyrants of … church and state.”13
That same dedication to liberty existed still in the colony of Massachusetts, Adams argued, and “liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”14
In what would prove to be prophetic posturing, Adams declared, “Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees for the people; and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute abler and better agents, attorneys, and trustees.”15
While John had intended to keep the authorship of his series a secret for the time being, his fellow townsfolk in Braintree knew who had written the letters. In late September, John was asked to write up the town’s instructions to its statewide representatives, using the arguments he had made in the press to explain and support Braintree’s decision to officially oppose the Stamp Act.
John eagerly took on the assignment; he would work all night if he had to. With this document, he could become not only the voice of Braintree but the voice of all of Massachusetts. A committee had been formed to work with him, but John told the others, Norton Quincy included, that he could write up a draft on his own and then submit it for their approval.
John told Abigail proudly of the assignment he had been given. She agreed that it was both an honor and an opportunity; resigning herself to another evening on her own with the baby, she prepared a tray of tea and biscuits to keep John going through the night and took herself off to bed. In the morning, finding him still hard at work in his office, she brought him his customary tankard of hard cider and more biscuits. She sat beside John in his office, Nabby on her lap, while he talked to her of the ideas he had laid out so far.
Abigail offered her comments freely on what John had composed. John had come to expect her input on everything he did, and this work on behalf of the town meeting was no different. He listened to her reasoning, he turned to his law books, he sat by his window gazing out at the distant shoreline, sunlight wavering through the meadow grasses. Then he turned back to his work. By the end of the day, John had finished the instructions for the village of Braintree. The next day the drafting committee approved what John had written, and confirmation of the instructions by the selectmen of Braintree followed swiftly.
John made clear in the Braintree instructions that “the inhabitants of this province appear to be entitled to all the rights aforementioned, by an act of parliament [the colony’s charter] … as well as upon principles of common justice; their ancestors having settled this country at their sole expense, and their posterity having approved themselves most loyal and faithful subjects of Great Britain.”16
The Stamp Act, John wrote, violated the rights of the colonists: “We have Always understood it to be a grand and fundamental principle of the British Constitution that no Freeman should be Subjected to any Tax to which he has not given his own Consent in person or by proxy.… We take it clearly therefore to be inconsistant with the Spirit of the Common Law and of the Essential Fundamentall principles of the British Constitution that we should be Subjected to any Tax imposed by the British Parliament because we are not Represented in that assembly in any sense.”17
The Braintree instructions were printed in the Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Gazette in early October. Within days, forty towns across Massachusetts had adopted them as their own. The instructions to their statewide representatives were uniform and unambiguous: the people of Massachusetts refused to comply with the Stamp Act, as it had been illegally promulgated by Parliament. John and Abigail were proud, for John was now speaking for the whole colony, no longer anonymously but loudly and clearly as John Adams, Esq., of Braintree. “I am … under all obligations of interest and ambition, as well as honor, gratitude and duty, to exert the utmost of abilities in this important cause,”18 John promised in his diary; and he delivered.
* * *
A new ship had been commissioned by John Hancock in the spring of 1765. When the ship took to the seas in the summer, it went by the name of Liberty. Along with its cargo, the ship carried a letter Hancock had written to John Barnard, his London agent, warning of the response of his colony if no relief came from enforcement of the Stamp Act: “it is a Cruel hardship upon us … we must be Ruined … the fatal effects of these Grievances you will feel very Sensibly.”19
Hancock had read the tenor of his town accurately: the tide of discontent was rising and its waves would be felt across the sea. Hancock planned on being one of the leaders to swell the discontent and ride the resulting waves to public prominence. The youngest of Boston’s five selectmen, he now became one of the loudest, and the one most willing to work with Sam Adams and his populist friends to bring about repeal of the Stamp Act, donating both his time and his money to support their efforts.
He joined with 250 other merchants of Boston in a boycott of trading with England. As he wrote in a letter to Barnard, again sent on the Liberty, he resolved to sell off all the stock presently in his warehouse and then shut down its doors and “never send one Ship more to sea nor have an
y kind of connection in Business under a stamp.” Hancock threatened to “never import another shilling’s worth of British goods”—and warned that all outstanding debts would be hard to secure, given that both venues for “remittances and courts of justice would alike vanish” under the Stamp Act.20 “I will not be a slave,” he declared a week later. “I have a right to the libertys and privileges of the English Constitution, and I as an Englishman will enjoy them.”21
In the midst of the Stamp Act crisis, Hancock sought out John Singleton Copley to paint his portrait. Meeting at Copley’s house, just down the hill from his own, Hancock laid out exactly how he wished to be painted. Certainly not as the wealthy prince of Beacon Hill, he explained. Such an image would jar with the political tempo of the turbulent year, when being a member of the elite meant a tainted link with the Crown, oppression, and tyranny.
Hancock might be known for “wearing lavender suits, driving in a bright yellow carriage, and exercising an extravagantly expensive taste for English goods,” but in the portrait that Hancock commissioned, he asked that Copley present him in plain clothes, doing plain work; he was to be portrayed as a man of the people.22
Copley’s finished portrait showed Hancock sitting on a simple wooden chair before a worktable, holding a quill pen with one hand while with the other, he folds back a page from the open ledger before him. He wears a dark blue coat over a simple white shirt; his wig is coiffed smooth, his face is serious. He is a man interrupted in a moment of work, waiting for the painter to finish so that he can get back to bolstering business and improving the economy for everyone.
Once painted, this version of John as the simple man of business was displayed prominently in the Hancock mansion for all to see, and pen-and-ink copies of it were distributed.
* * *
By early September 1765, boxes of official stamps began to arrive in the colony—called by Hancock “the most disagreeable commodity … that were ever imported into this country.”23 But there was nowhere for them to go but into storage on Castle Island: one by one, the Crown-appointed stamp distributors had quit their posts under pressure exerted by the Sons of Liberty.
On November 1, the date by which all listed items were to carry stamps, there was no change in how business was conducted in Boston, or anywhere else in Massachusetts. The stamps continued to languish on Castle Island, still in their boxes, with no one to sell them. Officers of the customhouse gave clearances for cargo coming into Boston and going out; they certified that no stamps were to be found and therefore compliance with the Stamp Act was impossible.
To celebrate Boston’s repudiation of the Stamp Act, Hancock held a dinner at the Green Dragon Tavern on November 5, inviting members of the different political groups of Boston’s North and South ends. For years November 5 had been celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day, with riotous celebrations, bonfires, and the burning of effigies of the Catholic pope, but Hancock hoped to transform the usual anti-Catholic hostilities into a movement of solidarity against Britain’s policies in Massachusetts. The pope was no longer the enemy, Hancock argued: Parliament and its agents in the colony were.
Hancock had much to celebrate that evening. The boycott would actually help his business, as he had become overloaded with goods as well as with debts (money owed to his English suppliers). Now he could unload the stock in his warehouses, selling off goods as pre-boycott bounty, and at the same time place his failure to pay his debts at the feet of his English partners; after all, it was their fault the Stamp Act was passed, and it was up to them to make sure it was repealed. Hancock appeared as the patriot he wished to be and yet lost little from his “sacrifice” to the cause. In that spirit, he hosted the entire evening of food and drinks, and toasted his compatriots, old and new, one after another.
* * *
Even the Crown officials in New England had written petitions to Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. Although these men could never condone intimidation or violence to achieve repeal of the act, the requests that came from Governor Francis Bernard, Thomas Hutchinson, and others begged for relief.
“There never was a poor people in so distracted a state as we are at this time. No officer of the crown is safe who shews the least disapprobation of the furious spirit prevailing against the stamp duty. I have felt the affects of popular rage more than has been known in America,” wrote Hutchinson in a plea sent to Parliament in the fall of 1765.24
The Crown officials, in appealing to Parliament, made no references to violated rights, nor did they make allegations of tyranny or oppression; instead, they asked for repeal as a favor to loyal subjects. The unspoken message was clear: save us from the tyranny of these unruly mobs.
* * *
Reverend Smith in Weymouth, in his last sermon for the year 1765, preached from his pulpit, “render therefore to Caesar, the Things that are Caesar’s and unto God the Things that are God’s.” As John Adams explained in his diary, “The Tenor of it was to recommend Honour, Reward, and Obedience to good Rulers; and a Spirited Opposition to bad ones.”25
Adams wholeheartedly rejoiced in his father-in-law’s “good deal of animated Declamation upon Liberty and the Times.” Unlike many of the other ministers in and around Boston, who had been promoting “Passive Obedience—as the best Way to procure Redress,” John Adams and Reverend Smith, and Abigail as well, were all of the same mind: “We have tryed Prayers and Tears, and humble Begging and timid tame submission as long as trying is good—and instead of Redress we have only increased our Burdens and aggravated our Condemnation.”26
None of the three could support the tactics of the Boston Sons of Liberty—not yet—but nor would they stand by and passively accept the oppressions of their rights by a Parliament thousands of miles away.
* * *
In the new year, the boycott of British goods continued; so many merchants had agreed to nonimportation that ledgers on both sides of the Atlantic, once filled to bursting with notations and scribbles, check marks and sums, were reduced to single columns and null profits. Hancock had warned his agents months before—“the heavy Taxes laid on the Colonies will be a great Damp to trade … we shall have little or no Demand for Supplies from England, this ought to be Consider’d, and hope we shall be Reliev’d, we are worth Saving in this part of the World”27—and his threat had come true.
John Hancock heard from his British friends, and his agents in both London and Bristol: the slowdown in trade was hurting British suppliers, merchants, and traders in Britain. The pain extended to the British islands of the West Indies: “our sugar islands will be deprived of their usual supplies of provisions,” wrote one leading merchant, and plantations on the islands would be “disabled from sending home their produce or even subsisting their slaves.”28
In addition, and perhaps worst of all for the merchants of Britain, there would be “little or no chance” of collecting debts owed to them from the American colonists, a situation that could “prove fatal” to their business; those who survived would have to put “a total stop of all purchase of manufactures for a country whence no returns can be expected … it naturally and unavoidably follows that an exceedingly great number of manufacturers are soon to be without employ and of course without bread.”29 Lord Rockingham (who had replaced Grenville as prime minister of England) and Parliament were pressed hard by influential lobbies to repeal the Stamp Act and save the British economy.
On May 16, 1766, the Harrison, one of John Hancock’s trading ships, pulled into Boston Harbor with the official news: the Stamp Act had been repealed by Parliament in March. The town burst into wild celebration. Bells pealed, guns were discharged into the sky, debtors’ bills paid so that the jails would be emptied and the streets filled with happy revelers. The Liberty Tree was decorated with flags, and more flags flew from windows and balconies and fence railings. Josiah Jr. had instructed that his home just down the road from the Liberty Tree be festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, and a flag hung from the windows of Edmund Quincy’s modest lodg
ings to the east.
Dolly and Katy walked the streets arm in arm, marveling at the joy expressed across the neighborhoods of Boston, from the narrow houses in tight lanes along the docks to the larger town houses along the Common and then spreading out to the North End. Governor Bernard opened his house to the selectmen of Boston and offered drinks all around in celebration, and even the lowliest deck swabbers secured tricolored ribbons to fly from the windows of the rooms they rented by Hancock Wharf. The relief felt by the colonists of Massachusetts was palpable: “Joy smil’d in every Countenance, Benevolence, Gratitude and Content seemed the Companions of all.”30
The Sons of Liberty, funded in part by Hancock, staged the largest fireworks ever set off in America, and Hancock followed up their pyrotechnics with a show of his own set off from the yard in front of his mansion. He ordered that tables be set up along the Common with pipes of Madeira, barrels of cider, and foodstuffs, and also hosted a dinner for twenty-nine at the Bunch of Grapes tavern, where he invited one after another guest to give a toast.
Newly elected to the Massachusetts General Court, the highest political seat in the colony, Hancock was not only celebrating the end of the Stamp Act but the beginning of his political career. John Adams recorded the importance of Hancock’s election as the moment when the town of Boston—and indeed the entire colony—“made that young man’s fortune their own.”31
Throughout the meal hosted at the Bunch of Grapes, Hancock made sure that everyone’s glasses were kept full, providing all the wine necessary to drink to His Majesty’s health. The gathered crowd was happy to praise King George, and even Parliament, for bringing relief to the colonies. As Hancock reported to his agent in London, “Our rejoicing has been conducted in a very decent, reputable manner; and I hope now peace and harmony will prevail.”32